Truth Must Be Love and Love Must Be Truth

2/6/2022

A religion of love. That is how most Christians define Christianity.

The definition is solid. Christianity is indeed a religion of love. This means that Christianity is a religion based on a great virtue.

Yet if the great virtue of love in Christianity is to have any real meaning, it must be anchored in another great virtue – truth.

This means that Christian love is intrinsic to truth. Love that is not rooted in truth is at best partial love – at worst, it is not love at all.

I believe this works the other way around as well.

If Christianity is indeed a religion of love, it must also be a religion of truth, which implies that any truth that is not rooted in love is at best a partial truth – at worst, not truth at all.

4 Comments

Michelle

2/8/2022 03:57:43

If I may add- any sect of Christianity that is rooted in fear, distrust, resentment, and compliance rather than love, wisdom, courage and strength, is not based inTruth at all, and is, in my opinion, demonstratively anti-Christian.

Francis Berger

2/8/2022 08:09:44

@ Michelle - Well put. If I may, I would like to extend that observation to cover individual Christians as well.

bruce charlton

2/8/2022 10:19:37

One of the things I got from the Fourth Gospel was that 'love' is not supposed to be only a virtue (although it is that) - but more profoundly something more like *the single metaphysical principle upon which everything else in Christianity is based*.

Of course, for this to be meaningful entails an understanding of love that is both deeper and broader than the usual; while also remaining 'inter-personal ' - since the Fourth Gospel also references love in a very concrete and way, between specific people (including with God the Father as person).

In other words, what is needed is a metaphysically profound understanding of love that is Not abstract - when 'abstract' love would mean something more like the New Age or 'Eastern' idea of love like vibrational state, energy, a field, an ether or some such physics-y concept.

This is quite easy and simple IF an 'animistic' understanding of reality is regarded as true - with creation made of personified 'beings' - because only beings can have a personal kind of love, and if beings are primary then such inter-being love might also be primary.

Although truth, like love, can usefully be regarded as a virtue - like love, truth also has a metaphysical aspect - as meaning 'real' or 'reality'.

Thus, to say some thing is true would then mean 'it is an aspect of reality'.

Francis Berger

2/8/2022 19:02:58

@ Bruce - I introduced them as virtues, but by the end I am referring exclusively to the metaphysical aspects. You nailed the essence of what I was attempting to communicate in this post.

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Truth Must Be Love and Love Must Be Truth

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